Valencies: A Science Fiction Novel Read online

  A surprisingly large number of people thought that you should be, and even considered it to be a moral obligation. Ha ha, boom boom. But suppose you used the word “should” as an evaluative and motivational expression, instead of a normative one? If you wish to climb to the top of the mountain, you should walk up rather than down, or stumble round in circles.

  Of course last time she’d come along this track she’d detected a snag with “evaluative”, too, but that was on the next level up and you had to start somewhere.

  All right, take Ralfo as your representative simple unreflecting man. Persuade him of the vileness of imperialism. Crisis for Ralf. Echoing voids of doubt, disillusion and guilt. Never again, as the poet said, will he be certain that what he imagines are the clear dictates of moral reason are not merely the ingrained and customary beliefs of his time and place. Anla allowed herself a fanfare of trumpets, bowing graciously.

  Okay, so then he might ask himself what he could do in the future to avoid prejudices and provincial mores, or, more to the point, almost universally accepted mores—and thus to discover what he really ought to do.

  That was merely another normative enquiry, though; the tough one was “show me that there is some form of behavior which I am obliged to endorse.”

  Moral constraint seemed to mean either that you should pursue good ends and eschew bad ones, or that you should be faithful to one or more correct rules of conduct. Greeks and Taoists versus Hebrews and Confucians, yeah, yeah.

  Chariots, it was incredible to think that they’d been chewing on this for upward of four thousand years without coming to a definitive, intuitively overwhelming conclusion. But then the imperial ideologists thought they had, didn’t they, with their jolly old stochastic memetic-extrapolatory hedonic calculus or whatever the fuck they were calling it these days. The least retardation of optimal development for the greatest number, world without end, or at least until the trend functions blur out. So they managed to get both streams of thought into one ethical scholium without solving anything. After all, why obey a rule like that? And who gets to define as “good” those magical parameters making up the package called “optimal development”?

  The besieged libertarians on Chomsky, she thought darkly, might differ from Ralf on the question of the good life.

  Anyway, even if we all agreed that certain parameters were good, why should that oblige us to promote their furtherance? It might be prudent good sense to do so, and aesthetically pleasing, and satisfy some itch we all have, and save us from being raped in the common, but then the sublime constraining force you sort of imagine the idea of moral obligation having just evaporates into self-serving circumspection.

  Admittedly there was that tricky number of Kant’s about us possessing a rational nature, and being noumena instead of brute phenomena, and thus not being able to act immorally without self-contradiction, but any fool could see that that went too far on the one hand and not far enough on the other, and anyway what was wrong with a bit of self-contradiction if you stopped when you needed eye implants?

  Anla giggled to herself, and wondered where Ben and the others had got to. He was probably off by himself gloomily hastening the day of the ophthalmologist. Well, was leaving Ben to his own devices a matter for moral self-rebuke?

  Shit, you’d think this bastard could do something to the genes in his nasal cavity.

  This man can see into the future. Fucking incredible, really, you just rip out a few million eigenvectors from your mathematical sketch of an octillion human beings, what’s that in hydrogen molecules, say three and a bit by ten to the twenty-three to the gram, into ten to the twenty-seven, shit, brothers and sisters, we’re statistically equal to three kilograms of hydrogen gas, yes, you plump for the major characteristics you think you’d like to play with and code them up into genes and build yourself a little memetic beastie that stands in for what you figure pushes and pulls thee and me and all our star-spangled relatives, and you breed the little buggers in a tasty itemized soup and watch the way the mutants go.

  Wonderful, Ralf. Bug-culture precapitulates bugged-culture. No way we can jump you won’t know about in advance, because the little bugs snitched on us.

  Have you ever wondered, Ralf, if we’re all just a big stochastic biotic projection for the Charioteers? See how we run.

  But you don’t let us mutate, do you, Ralf? That’s where you fumbled the ball, Dr A, in your ancient poems. The Empire will never fall. We will live forever, and the boring Empire with us.

  Anla lashed out viciously with her foot.

  “Will you fucking stop snoring!”

  §

  The skite shot across Ralf’s deserted dropspace, lights splashing the deserted studio. The party was well and truly over. One vehicle remained, snug under weather-shield. The sculptormobile presumably.

  “She must’ve got a lift back, Ben.”

  The shared lie would last them back to the alien, familiar city, would keep the certainty of Anla, lying low in the arms of the enemy somewhere in the dark dacha, at one remove from reality for another hour.

  Ben took the knife in his right hand, while his left continued to stroke the foddle’s reprieved neck. For a second the blade stood against the light-spattered sky (was it the same galaxy as home? he couldn’t remember), its point between his thumb and index finger. It spun twice, then, thudded into the timber door, and stuck there, quivering, above the star-like brass knob.

  3.

  Brisk G2 sunlight, slanting to the bed, woke Theri.

  Small bubbles had long since formed and burst in the durobond ceiling, and little shards hung like leaves ready to fall. A glo-panel, its adhesion waning like the gravitational constant, had broken away at one end from its induction surface.

  A fly circled through the sunlight, wings glinting, and shot suddenly to the panel. It hung upside down for a few seconds, cleaning its legs, before strolling across to peruse the horizon of its flat-earth world.

  Theri turned her face away from the sun and kissed Kael’s neck. It wasn’t often they woke in contact with each other, like this, though they usually drifted to sleep in some sort of embrace. Sighing, she resumed her catalogue of their holiday room.

  A collection of holograms smiled from the mantelpiece in random directions: cognates, presumably, or ancestors, of the people who’d rented them the house. From the largest frame an elderly youth in mortarboard and academic gown looked down, a slightly bewildered expression on his mustachioed face. He clutched a roll of paper to his chest.

  Strange how you could tell he wasn’t a baby. Some hint of desperation in his eyes. Must have worked for years at night for that thing, chasing the education he’d missed in his frontier youth. Earning enough in daytime drudgery to pay for his clan-kin or to meet his world’s amortization debt; hurrying to evening peptide shots, scouring his Databank, cudgeling his brains through the law of torts and the case of Imperator vs Boggs.

  And now caught by the laser on his final triumphant day, the image providing documentary evidence just as necessary and admissible as the rolled-up diploma in his hand and the numerical record filed forever with maximum precautionary redundancy in deep core.

  Maybe they ought to grant degrees carved on blocks of stone, something with a bit of substance to it, something to put you at risk of a hernia every time you picked it up.

  Theri sat up in bed, looked down at her lover: graduate educer now, due shortly to join Anla in her profession. If not in her avocation as libertarian revolutionary. He slept on his back with his mouth half open, showing his teeth. Strong, even teeth, one of his best features, giving a bit of firmness to the softness of his mouth. His mouth was weak, really, and small.

  The bristles on his face took the alien sunlight like unevenly worn sandpaper, growing thick along his upper lip and chin, patchy along his jaw. Theri occasionally persuaded him to grow a beard, but he always smeared it off after two or three weeks, finding some pretext for being clean cheeked. He might instead have used an en
zyme boost, and flowered like a prophet, but that was hardly old Socrates’ style.

  She slid her fingers into his hair which fanned out, matted and leonine, on the pillow. Fine, light hair; her fingers caught in a knot and pulled at his scalp. Kael shifted a little, turning his head. Not wanting him to wake yet, she drew back.

  The hoot of a cargo-vessel, long and muffled, came from the harbor, warning swimmers and free craft of its impending set down. Someone clattered around in the back garden of the terrace. Ben or Catsize, up already.

  That Neanderthal scientist, Ben, she reflected, had produced a fine endogenous black beard after he’d married Anla. It lent him the look of a half-crazed frontier doctor. The sort of physician who loomed out of the midnight rain on a broken-down hack, delivered the badly breached baby in the nick of time, cursed the lack of trained midwives and civilized pharmaceuticals, revived the expiring mother with a quick whiff of pungents instead, conjured an ampoule of buzz from the soaked pocket of his frock-coat, shot half, passed the rest to the tribe, and disappeared into the rain again.

  The mad doctor probably hadn’t slept at all. Theri slipped from the bed and padded to the window. There was Ben, working his way along the garden fence, checking for chinks, securing the gate (no classy safe-fields at these rental prices), creating a haven for last night’s foddle.

  She could see the animal eagerly chewing the rented grass, its little teeth crunching rhythmically, its head nodding purposefully. Industrious little beast, building useless ruth precursors with every chomp.

  Christ, she thought, they can’t really be going to kill that thing, for all the forbidden delights of its nonsynthesized proteins. We’d look pretty stupid waiting around for Anla to come home and slay it for us.

  Pity about Anla and Ben, but that’s their style, here or on Victoria or anywhere. Anla taking off with some impossible man. Ben wandering around gloomily picking his nose, going for walks, competing without heart with a chessmaster program. Two days, three, never longer. Anla returning: triumphant, unrepentant, radiant.

  Lusty wench, our Anla, long black hair and long fingers, good at haranguing the masses and telling everyone where they get off and what’s what.

  Anla floating around the house as if nothing has happened. Ben almost catatonic with sullenness, vidding his library. Bright Anla coming and going through the rooms of the house with no interface to his gloomy world.

  Suddenly the recriminations, the real hurt out in the open. Anla flaring back. A day, a day and a half, of hot angry words. Reconciliation. All’s well for another couple of months. Been going on for four orthoyears now, Theri thought, funny way to live. Not like me and the sleeping Socrates, but at least each of them knows what the other thinks.

  What have you been thinking about, Kael, as we’ve drifted through this holiday? Eating and drinking our way around Newstralia. Relaxed and expansive in the cafes and restaurants, feeding your face with garlic crustaceans cooked in oil, with crisp-skinned nightingsnail, with felafel, with ednafish in puce-bean sauce. And in the long afternoons in the buzz gardens of half-deserted pubs and in the garden of this house and this strange bedroom?

  Kael, what goes on behind your blue eyes, your warm sleepy words? Are you happy with me on those littered beaches, among the bodies and the crushed cups, or in the crowds under the garish lights, making fun of the vulgar feelie come-ons with their neuroinducers limited by law to a zone no greater than three-quarters of the width of the sidewalk so that prudes of both sexes blanch at the tingle in their loins; what do you think of me at times like that?

  A good man at keeping your own counsel, not one for the claws of argument, the knives of passion.

  Kael, sweet Kael, what goes on in your head? What do I know about you, or you about me? All we’ve really done here is put on mass in the wrong places and celebrate a mutual languid happiness, an absence of tension. We’ve got nothing to be tense about. I really mustn’t eat so much, neither of us must.

  §

  In silence, barely awake, Kael watched through half closed eyes his Theri spread her elbows like wings.

  Standing by the window, she ran her hands over her stomach, straightened her back and tightened the muscles of her abdomen. Her hair flowed down her back almost to her bum—a nice bum, white from the kini.

  Kael felt, even if he did not see, her splayed fingers pressing from her pelvic arch, across her belly, up over the jut of her ribcage, passing to right and left of her breasts. Theri stretched, crucified on the morning (nice image, that, he thought; at least the Christers’ fifth millennial comeback has done some small good, even if it’s turned Theri into a masochist), and she pivoted with the sunlight on her face and shoulders, and padded barefoot to the door. Funny toes the girl’s got.

  She reached for her sombrero, breasts silhouetted. Sweet tits for the holding. Theri under the black sombrero drew an imaginary weapon, took steady aim at the helpless Kael.

  The invisible flash would have blinded him if he hadn’t had his eyes nearly closed.

  Theri spun the gun nonchalantly on her index finger, slid it easily into a holster low on her hip, and left, sombrero aslant, for the shower.

  Kael lay back and looked at the autumnal ceiling in the summer’s light. Resurrected, he too was now well-armed. Get her when she comes back from the shower, her skin moist, teach her some real shooting.

  Bang!

  “Charioteers!”

  Kael leapt from his bed, hot-footed it to the amenities. Theri stood affrighted against the farther wall, sombrero resting upside down in the open stillcell. The faintest mist of warm moisture drifted to the charged lining of the cell. Efficient Kael glanced at the readout panel, adjusted the field, reset the failsafes. He turned and stared at her.

  “It’s almost impossible, what you just did,” he said mildly.

  She stamped her foot. There were goosebumps on her skin. “Don’t start.”

  “It’s not hard to understand how to operate it, little, really it isn’t. You must put a terrific lot of effort into not understanding, actually. Still, what I don’t understand is how you managed what you just did.”

  “I mean it, don’t start. Piss off and let me wash myself in peace.”

  “It’s quite an old invention, petal, though not as old as, say, the wheel. They designed it to conserve water, my dear Theri, because a lot of Newstralia is a dune planet. See, there’s this pulsed spherical forcefield that gulps in a lot of air and squeezes it very hard to wring the water out of it, which also heats the aforementioned liquid to the desired temperature. What you did, my bundle, was make the field expand instead of contract before it switched off, and all the air rushed very fast into the vacuum and made a big noise.”

  “I can’t hear you, shithead,” she said from within the still-cell. “Anyway, that sounds like a lot of garbage to me. What happens when the field is contracting and a new lot of air is coming in, eh? answer me that. Why doesn’t that create a vacuum, smartarse? And what makes you assume it was my fault, there are five people in this house, all I did was turn it on, after all, so the statistical likelihood that I caused it to happen is one in five, hardly overwhelming odds as I think even you will be obliged to agree.”

  “Ah, but you were the proximate agent, and this is not the first such occasion. Indeed, if we multiply the number of times such baffling technological failures have taken place in your immediate vicinity, I imagine we’d come closer to figures of, oh, say one in several millions, without straining our memories. And if you can’t follow the simple train of thought involved in my lucid description of the principle involved, there’s no doubt in my mind that an unprejudiced jury of your peers would take this as prima facie— Umph. What are you— Stop that at once, my girl, what would your parents—”

  §

  Theri and Kael at screw in the still-cell. A warm rain, the hidden pulsing field doing its job discreetly and well. Gentle Kael meek and mild holding back his loved one’s face. Purple horseshoes on Kael’s shoulders. I m
eant it to hurt, it’s not enough. Theri coming gently, with frustrated tenderness, in the exploding shower of a rented terrace on an alien world.

  §

  They strolled later down El Cheapo Street, favorite address of babies here on vacation, the spine of a fairly fetid slum still clinging to a distinctive identity from the most primitive years of the planet’s initial colonization.

  It was a jumble of old stone and rusting iron, wrought and heaved into place by human and animal muscle-power. Warped lanes twisted to the waterfront, open balconies transformed into enclosed living space by sheets of buckling durobond.

  A flamboyant ornithopter, vividly striped in applegreen and red, flapped low overhead, making for the more opulent surf beaches away from the harbor. Kael held Theri’s hand loosely.

  Catsize and Ben emerged from a free-enterprise commissary, Ben carrying a box of food, foils and loaves and a stick of salami visible at the top. Catsize labored under a rather large crate of lettuce or some vegetable resembling it.

  “What the hell do you take us for, a colony of rabbits?”

  “Not at all, my good man, these are William’s rations.”

  “Who?”

  “William Wool, our fuzzy little foddle friend from last night’s woeful expedition, now at play in our garden.”

  “But he’s meant to provide us with food. And what’s wrong with grass, anyway?”

  “Not enough, and of an inferior quality.”

  “Some foddle rustler you are.”

  “No less than certain others. Good day to you both.”

  §

  The handouts of lettuce were devoured in seconds. Ben opened the door and summoned William Wool. The beast dashed at once across the newly desolate garden. Never entirely convincing as a garden, now it was a doleful sight: grass chewed to the quick, shrubs mere tattered remnants, bark frayed to kindling.

  The foddle hurtled past Ben’s legs and stood in the kitchen babbling for milk. He removed its ribbon and tinkling bell—pilfered on its behalf by Catsize from the untenanted cage of some domestic or decorative bird—and outfitted William Wool to face the world. A heavy leather collar ferocious with studs replaced the ribbon, a length of almost invisible monomer providing the requisite contact between man and client.